Jonathan McNicol

Producer

Jonathan started at WNPR as an intern in 2010 and was hired later that year. In his work, Jonathan is always just trying to figure out a little bit of how the world works, while paying special attention to the absurd and the just plain goofy. He is as likely to produce a show on America’s jury system as he is a story on all the grossest parts of the human body. His work has been heard nationally on Here & Now and locally on WNPR’s talk shows, on Morning Edition, and on All Things Considered.

Jonathan comes to radio from a background in, of all things, graphic design. He lives in the greater New Haven area.

Ways to Connect

Matt Iannazzo was a baseball star at Norwalk High School, pitching them to an FCIAC title in 2007. At the University of Pittsburgh, he was an All-Conference pitcher. Out of college, Iannazzo signed with the Chicago Cubs and played two seasons near the bottom of their organization. Now he pitches for the Bridgeport Bluefish in the independent Atlantic League of Professional Baseball.

The ten-part Netflix documentary "Making a Murderer" covers the 2007 conviction in Manitowoc County, Wisc., of Steven Avery for the murder of Teresa Halbach. A secondary story in the film is the interrogation, confession, and later conviction of Avery's nephew, Brendan Dassey, as an accessory to the crime.

Start with four parts "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial." That's your base. Then you'll need two parts "The Goonies," two parts "Poltergeist," and two parts "Alien." Mix in one part each of "It," "Stand by Me," "Firestarter," "Explorers," "Carrie," and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Add a Winona Ryder-shaped dollop of "Beetlejuice," and top off with a dash of the covers of classic '70s and '80s horror novels.

Colin's out today. He got vocal nodes while moonlighting as Mariah Carey’s backup singer, and he's seeing his otolaryngologist. Or he sprained an ankle during a performance with The Rockettes, and now he's in traction.

As we were preparing for our show on underdogs a few months ago, I kept saying that we shouldn't overlook the fact that, often, to be an underdog in the first place, you have to be really bad at the thing you're an underdog about.

The more we talked about it, the more I found myself making the case that losers and losing are fascinating.

When we did our show on Romeo and Juliet a few months ago, Tina Packer invited us to come up to Shakespeare & Co. in Lenox, Mass., to see her new production of The Merchant of Venice this summer. Colin said we'd love to; we'll come up there and do a show!

It seemed like the sort of niceties that people often toss off on the radio.

But it turns out they meant it. And so, so did we! So we went up and taped a show in the Berkshires with Tina and her Shylock, Jonathan Epstein.

In January 2015, when it was announced that a planned new Ghostbusters movie would feature four female leads, internet fanbros went crazy. And then, this March, when the first Ghostbusters trailer came out, the internet fanbros went crazy all over again.

As you may have heard, Pokemon is back (are back?) with the release last week of a new game. Pokemon Go is an augmented reality app that, through the magic of GPS on your phone, adds Pokemon to your surroundings, or, at least, to your surroundings as represented on your phone's screen, so that you can catch them.

There's a new entry in the long, long canon of Tarzan stories and adaptations and shows and movies and musicals and Happy Meals toys or whatever. This time around, True Blood's Alexander Skarsgård stars as the bare-chested, animal-whispering titular character. The Nose went to see "The Legend of Tarzan," and we can't help but recognize its troubles of race and unending violence in this week's news.

Before Stephen Colbert and John Oliver, before Jon Stewart and Conan O’Brien, before "The Simpsons," before David Letterman, before "Saturday Night Live," before The National Lampoon… before all the great subversive American satirists that we’ve all grown… used to — before all that, there was MAD magazine.

It's 5:00 pm. You're at the Quinnipiack Club in New Haven, where you've been shut up in the library. A big, red, digital clock sits in the corner, counting down from 90 minutes.

You and 14 other people sit around a table. In the middle of the table sits $300. An audience looks on as you and the others try to figure out what to do with this stack of cash before the time runs out.

Earlier this year at the Golden Globes, the top TV honor, Best Television Series -- Drama, went to USA's hacker technothriller series "Mr. Robot." Last year, the trophy went to Showtime's "The Affair."

Between those two new shows, there are threepoint-of-viewcharacters, three narrators. And you can’t really trust, you can't fully believe a one of them.

I swear we almost never pick the Nose panelists based on the topics we plan to discuss. (We barely ever even plan in the first place, to be honest.) I asked Mr. Dankosky -- former Vice President of News for WNPR, current Executive Editor of the New England News Collaborative -- weeks ago to make his Nose debut this Friday.

America's Greatest Living Film Critic David Edelstein has called "Weiner," the new documentary about former Congressman Anthony Weiner's ill-fated 2013 run for mayor of New York City, "one of the most provocative [docs] of its kind" that he's seen.

Paul Simon's 13th solo studio album, Stranger to Stranger, is out on Friday. It has apparently been gestating for going on four years, and it's full of Harry Partch's microtonal instruments like cloud chamber bowls and the chromelodeon. Dean Drummond's zoomoozophome even makes an appearance. At the same time, the album is pretty rockin' and fun.

Ron Darling won a World Series. He was a Major League All-Star and a Gold Glove winner. He pitched a record-setting eleven hitless innings in an NCAA playoff game at Yale Field. He threw 2,742 and one-third professional innings over 15 professional seasons, winning 157 professional games.

Comedian Maria Bamford's new Netflix single-camera sitcom, "Lady Dynamite," premiered last Friday. And it's... odd. It's surreal. It's sad. It's a comedy that's very much about mental illness and loneliness and anxiety. And it's a comedy that's very much about itself too.

In the more than six years that it's been on the air, we've never taken The Colin McEnroe Show to the Peabody Museum before. (Crazy, right?) And: In the more than six years that it's been on the air, we've never done a Colin McEnroe Show about dinosaurs before. (Crazy! Right!?)